NEWS & UPDATES

Here is the latest on what's going on with Larry, Diane and portcommodore.com.

Along with the CommVEx portion, Port Commodore pages got a new template design. which includes a quick navigation bar (on the top) to get to the various sections quickly.

Also check out my other site: http://www.larrymade.com, which is the business side of what I do.

The CommVEx portion has been updated to better reflect the commodore theme, as well as an homage to the VIC-20 which celebrates thirty years of friendly computing.

Look, I'm moving into the 21st century - instead of hard-coding all the pages in HTML (nothing wrong with that, just takes time) I've instituted a small Content Management System (CMS). This CMS will:

• give portcommodore.com a much nicer and consistent look
• make life easier for me and my wife to make additions to the pages
• provide a text search facility for you guys
• ability to have spelling check (I know I can use that!)
• provides an RSS feed for those of you breathlessly are awaiting PortCommodore updates
• and support for code “syntax highlighting” (I plan to add more content on PHP and Python programming)

If you are curious about what I am running the new site on, it's DokuWiki wiki with a “front-end” template called Dokubook, which adds the easy navigation menu on the left. Additional plug-ins are a gallery plug-in for the photo pages, and a backup plug-in to make backing up portcommodore a breeze.

All of these to install took about an hour of downloading, un-archiving, copying folders into folders and then some quick initial configuration. (Redoing all the pages from HTML to WikiText will take me significantly longer.)

So portcommodore content will be copied over, web locations and formatting will change (Nothing is as flexible as hard-coding HTML) Hopefully, most of it for the good.

So what's been keeping me busy for the past few years? Well, I've been rewriting my work database in PHP (quite a project as the database has been built up over a decade.) Part of the master plan for the database is to open source it, to build a support community to improve what I have written and develop further uses for WANDA (which stands for Web Accessible Non-Profit Database Application). You've seen one bit of WANDA over the past couple years, the events list/calendar, which will be getting a much needed re-working sometime in the coming year.

If you are interested, check out my WANDA site at http://www.wandahome.org and if you are a PHP guy - let me know what you think.

A friend of mine, Jay Bracket, artist/story teller has started a new business, Cable Car Innovations, which is to create a stylish cable car themed structures to be used in a variety of settings. Which I think will be a great hit once enough people notice (and this link is part of that). Certainly beats any of those plain jane box structutres/stores you see all over the place. Check it out, if you think it is cool, tell your business friends.